His fear resulted from the realization that his mind-world contained
phenomena it had no right to contain--not if he was nearly as
well-adjusted as he considered himself to be. The three women standing
before him definitely were not memory-images. They were too vivid, for
one thing. For another, they were aware of him. What were they, then?
And what were they doing in his mind?
He asked the two questions aloud.
Three arms were raised and three forefingers were pointed accusingly at
his chest. Three pairs of eyes burned darkly. "You ask us that?" Miss
Stoddart said. "Callous creature who did a maiden's innocence affront!"
said Officer Finch. "And sought sanctuary in ill-fitting robes of
righteousness!" said Vera Velvetskin. The three faces moved together,
blurred and seemed to blend into one. The three voices were raised in
unison: "You know who we are, Nathan Blake. _You_ know who we are!"
Blake stared at them open-mouthed. Then he turned and fled.
* * * * *
It had taken man a long time to discover that he was a god in his
own right and that he too was capable of creating universes. Trivial
universes, to be sure, when compared with the grandeur and scope of the
objective one, and peopled with ghosts instead of human beings; but
universes nonetheless.
The discovery came about quite by accident. After projecting himself
into a patient's memory one day, a psychologist named Trevor suddenly
found himself clinging to the slope of a traumatically distorted
mountain. His patient was beside him.
The mountain proved to be an unconscious memory-image out of the
patient's boyhood, and its country proved to be the country of the
patient's mind. After many trials and errors, Trevor managed to get
both himself and his patient back to the objective world, and not long
afterward he was able to duplicate the feat on another case.
The next logical step was to enter his own mind, and this he also
succeeded in doing.
It was inevitable that Trevor should write a book about his discovery
and set about founding a new school of psychology. It was equally
inevitable that he should acquire enemies as well as disciples.
However, as the years passed and the new therapy which he devised cured
more and more psychoses, the ranks of his disciples swelled and those
of his enemies shrank. When, shortly before his death, he published a
paper explaining how anyone could enter his or her own mind-world at
will, his niche in the Freudian hall of fame was assured.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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